Stephen D. Cannerelli / The Post-Standard"The more jobs you have, the more money you make, the bigger your retirement is," explained tax assessor Larry FItts, pictured here in his town of Pompey office. He's also the assessor for seven other towns. At one point, he worked for 10 municipalities.

Syracuse, NY -- Larry Fitts retired Feb. 1, 2008.

For exactly one day.

He went back to work the next day, collecting his regular pay plus his pension of $91,000 a year.

Fitts, 67, was the appointed assessor for eight different towns when he retired. For most of his career, he worked for 10 towns at a time, building part-time salaries into big bucks.

His pension was based on his three highest years of earnings. In 2004, he pulled in the most: $178,577. In 2005, he made $165,273; in 2006, $161,136.

When Fitts met with a worker at the local state retirement office to talk about his pension, the guy was shocked by how much Fitts made. Then the state worker figured the pension.

"He looks at the numbers and he just went, 'Wow,' " Fitts recalled. "I imagine he does that for a great number of people, and he doesn't see a number like that every day."

Probably not. There are only eight people in Onondaga County who receive a bigger state pension than Fitts. Four are medical doctors, and all but one worked at either Upstate University Hospital or Hutchings Psychiatric Center. Fitts' pension is higher than former County Executive Nicholas Pirro's. He receives $84,491 a year.

Fitts said he'd always planned to continue working after he retired. The pension was too good to pass up: $91,000 more for the same amount of work.

It works for the towns that hire, too. They don't have to pay into the pension system for their assessor since he's already taking his pension.

The town of Pompey, one of his employers, saves about $4,000 a year by employing Fitts as a retiree.

The state has no figures on how many people are like Fitts -- retirees collecting their pensions while they work in the jobs from which they retired. If Fitts had wanted to do this before he turned 65, he would need a waiver from the state. There are 192 workers with those waivers in state government and another 367 in local government.

But once you're 65, you can legally double-dip. And no one's counting how many people are like Fitts: getting paid by the government while collecting a government pension.

The state pension system paid out $6.84 billion last year. The more than 3,000 employers in New York that participate, like the town of Pompey, paid in $2.65 billion. Concerned about unsustainable retirement costs, the state Legislature approved reforms that legislators hope will save billions in the future.

People like Fitts are untouched by the changes. He hasn't done anything wrong. He knew the system, and made it work for him. The math was simple: "Basically, the more jobs you have, the more money you make, the bigger your retirement is," Fitts said.

Hiring extra hands

He started his career in 1971 as the town assessor for Homer in Cortland County. As an assessor, Fitts decides the value of properties in a town.

In two years, he was working for five towns. Seven years out, 10 towns. Fitts built himself an assessing empire. He pulled in more than $150,000 by working for 10 towns at a time. He bought a house valued at $500,000 on the Jamesville Reservoir.

But there wasn't enough of Fitts to go around. He hired his own clerks to handle the paperwork, filing and sometimes office hours in some of the towns. With a few exceptions, the towns do not pay his clerks. Fitts pays them out of his own pocket so he can pick them. He now has five part-time clerks.

Fitts also has a side business called Fitts Appraisal Co. He earns extra money for doing revaluations for towns where he is not the appointed assessor. He brought his son, Brian, onboard there.

Fitts learned how to wheel and deal in business when he was just 12. He says he got the idea that he could make some quick cash growing and selling peas in Homer, where he grew up. He figured if he could get a farmer he knew to rent him some land, and get some pretty little girls to sell the peas on the roadside, he could make some decent money. And he did: about $400 that summer for peas, he recalled.

But first he had to talk his way into the farmer's good graces. Fitts offered to clean the farmer's three-story chicken coop. Fitts and another boy spent a week scraping the chicken manure out of the coop. And, he said, they got to grow their peas on the farmer's land for free.

Eventually, after working for a firm in Ithaca, he decided he wanted to be out on his own. Fitts found his new career flipping through the newspaper in Homer. There was a story about the town of Homer disbanding its assessment board and hiring an appointed assessor. Fitts put on his rubber boots and went over to the town supervisor's barn. He had the job a week later, he said.

Elbridge unhappy with delay

After a few years, he'd built himself up to 10 towns. Being in 10 places at once wasn't without trouble.

Fitts' townwide revaluations for Elbridge and Marcellus were both a year late, according to town supervisors and Fitts.

Elbridge supervisor Ken Bush said that was the last straw for his town, where Fitts had been the assessor for about 15 years. Bush said people were irate when they received their new assessments because Fitts used figures from before the housing market tanked. Bush said 400 people came to talk to Fitts about their assessments. Fitts brought his son to talk to some of them and limited them to 10 minutes, which made them madder, Bush said.

Fitts still had three years left on his six-year term. The quickest way for Elbridge to get him out was to share an assessor with Camillus, Bush said. The town board voted to do that in October. Fitts was not happy about the arrangement. Bush said the Camillus assessor has been to the town more in the past few months than Fitts was all year.

"Maybe he was overcommitted," Bush said.

Fitts said part of the reason why he was behind was because Elbridge decided too
late that it wanted a revaluation -- to have the assessor decide if properties were properly valued based on the current real estate market. "I was partly at fault, but they were partly at fault for delaying it initially," Fitts said.

Dan Ross, the supervisor in Marcellus, said Fitts' revaluation of the towns property was supposed to be done in 2007, but Fitts didn't finish it until 2008. Fitts told the town board he was delayed because someone on his staff was ill.

"There wasnt much we could do about it," Ross said. "He got behind."

State: It's legal

Fitts said someone on his staff had a heart attack, so he had to do much of the work himself. He said he'll postpone a project if he thinks it's not going to get done correctly.

"I'll say, 'We have to delay this for a year and get this right before we send it out to the public,' " Fitts said.

Fitts' company is working on three revaluation projects in addition to his job as assessor for eight towns.

Ross said the town of Marcellus is happy with Fitts' work. But he did wonder if Fitts should be getting pension credits for all of the money the town was paying him, because he was using some of that money to pay a clerk.

A state comptrollers spokesperson said assessors are exempt from most pension restrictions, such as those that govern town attorneys, because they are appointed public officials. The spokesperson also could find no prohibition against an assessor hiring staff to help.

The town of Pompey never had any problems with Fitts' work, said Carole Marsh, town supervisor. "He does an excellent job," Marsh said. "He understands the lay of the land."

Fitts said his son, Brian, is now the assessor for the city of Norwich. And his son plans to take on more towns in the future.